Entrepreneurial Students More Grounded-As Dot-Com Dreams Fade, Business Basics Come to Fore

Just three years ago, it seemed that every third
dorm room in the country was home to a
would-be dot-com whose founders dreamed of
making a million before they made it to
graduation.

By Ellen McCarthy
Washington Post Staff Writer

But even with the bubble burst, students are still
expressing interest in the creative but risky
world of entrepreneurship.

"We really have undergone a cultural shift over
the last 10 years, where the stories of young
people starting their own firms and being
successful began to pile up," said Patrick Von
Bargen, executive director of the National
Commission on Entrepreneurship. "That
changed the perception of students as to what
career goals are open to them and
entrepreneurship had become one. There is
probably no going back from that now."

A 2001 Harris Poll of graduating seniors found
that 56 percent said it is likely they will work for
themselves or start their own businesses
someday.

Charles N. Toftoy, director of the entrepreneurship program at George Washington University, said
enrollment in undergraduate entrepreneurship classes at the D.C. school has quadrupled in the past three
years.

"I think there are a lot of reasons for the growth — layoffs, hiring freezes, [companies] reneging on job
contracts. These kids know that it’s last in, first out in the corporate world," Toftoy said. "Having control
over their own lifestyle is more important to this generation than other generations that have gone before
them."

J. Robert Baum, an entrepreneurship professor at the University of Maryland, said the students in his
classes are undeterred by the failures of college-based companies of the 1990s, but they now see the
value in learning traditional business lessons such as how to sell a product or manage corporate growth.

"Undergraduates are totally crazy about starting new businesses, they have few constraints like
mortgages or babies, and the whole entrepreneurship field still carries that get-rich-quick reputation,"
Baum said.

Jacklyn Blecker, a senior studying finance and entrepreneurship at GWU, said that watching previous
tech-company failures pushed her to learn the basics. Blecker, who hopes to run her own firm in the next
five or six years, says she now knows that successful business owners need to be every bit as practical
as they are innovative.

"I don’t think I could go and open my own business right now, because I don’t have the experience. I want
to be behind someone who’s done it for a while, so I can learn from their mistakes," she said. "You can
have a great idea — you can be the next Bill Gates — but if you don’t know how to run a company, it’s not
going to work. That’s what these classes teach, and that’s why they are such a great idea."

Blecker and other students in the GWU program have an opportunity to learn about the real pitfalls of
entrepreneurship by helping some of Washington’s small-business owners solve specific problems.
University of Maryland students can partner with professors and entrepreneurs in the community to learn
practical business lessons, and Georgetown University students develop complex business plans that will
be presented publicly and judged.

Ilya Zusin, a 20-year-old sophomore at Maryland, knows just how hard it can be to create and manage a
successful company. After his freshman year, Zusin and a friend left college to establish SpringBee Inc., a
technology consulting firm, but suspended operations as the economy began to crash and their initial
funding dried up.

Now back at Maryland, Zusin entered the entrepreneurship program to study business fundamentals while
maintaining his creative drive. Zusin joined two professors at the dental school and another business
student to create Articulation Innovations LLC, a firm that sells dental devices invented by the professors.

"They needed some help with the business side of things, and I wanted the experience of working with a
physical product rather than a service this time," Zusin said. "The resources at the CEO program allowed
me to be better prepared. I did a lot of my own research on the market for this company and know what we
need to do to succeed."

Penny Lewandowski, executive director of the Greater Baltimore Technology Council, which is currently
running a business-plan competition for Maryland college students, said she has seen interest in
entrepreneurship rise as the economy fell. A year and a half ago, when planning for the competition began,
Lewandowski said her committee struggled to find interested students. At the first program meeting earlier
this month, more than 100 students registered to participate.

Von Bargen of the entrepreneurship group said that five years ago student entrepreneurs felt the economic
push to get their products and services to market first, leaving little room to focus on running the business.

"Now kids have realized they’ve got more time and are saying, ‘I still want to be an entrepreneur, still want
have my own business, but I’ve got to take it a little more slowly, a little more methodically, take my time
learning the process,’ " he said.

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